Daytona Main Street parties get mixed reviews

Friday

Aug 15, 2014 at 7:14 PMAug 15, 2014 at 10:51 PM

By Eileen Zaffiro-Keaneileen.zaffiro-kean@news-jrnl.com

DAYTONA BEACH — For years, summer nights on Main Street have found the corridor between the river and ocean fairly quiet and dark, with only a smattering of customers and motorcycles at the bars.Not this summer.Every Saturday night, the road that typically fills up only during biker events has been pulling in crowds for street festivals complete with bands playing along the sidewalks.As the weekly parties on the pavement come to an end tonight, some are praising them as a great idea to liven up the road that hasn’t bustled year-round for a few decades.But others say the effort has been a flop that wasted about $15,000 of city money and about $12,000 of business owner money to cover expenses such as police presence and trash pickup.Critics say the event — known as Summer Nights on Main Street — suffered from an identity crisis, starting out kid-friendly with bounce houses and games, and then abruptly taking a dramatic shift to adult-oriented with little more than scantily clad women dancing in the streets, three temporary bars in the middle of the road offering a full range of alcoholic drinks, loud music blaring from a few different businesses, and carnival-type food for sale.“It’s totally not a family environment at all,” said local attorney Dan Webster, a former member of the city’s Main Street Redevelopment Area Board who lives near Main Street. “With the road blocked off, it interrupts the flow of traffic. To me it’s a big waste.”Webster’s biggest complaint is the loud music, loud enough that a person on Main Street has to nearly shout to the person beside them and loud enough that he hears it at his house until the wee hours.“They have no regard for the neighborhood,” Webster said. “We just close the door and pray for rain.”City Commissioner Kelly White helped conceive the idea for the street in her zone several months ago along with the city manager after they both attended a conference in New York City on public spaces.White isn’t bothered that the inaugural street festivals fell short of some people’s expectations.It was a pilot project aiming to help turn the core tourist area of the beachside into a year-round draw, and to make the area more walkable, she said.“You expect there to be things to work on, and things that worked great,” she said. “It was an attempt to do something different. Maybe it hasn’t stuck yet. You learn what works. Maybe it would be better to do it once per month.”She sees positives, like an influx of people onto a road starving for business patronage most of the year, and what she calls “a much more positive vibe.”“We talk about Main Street ad nauseam, but we don’t try much,” said White, who’s seeking another four-year term this fall. “We’re experimenting, and we’re looking for feedback. Maybe part of it works. I think we can build upon it.”White said she went to the festivals twice at the beginning of the summer, when there were still children’s activities like kiddie dance contests, and she hasn’t had time to go back again. She said she spent a lot of her time there asking people why they had come. She found tourists who had spontaneously discovered it, and locals who were repeat customers who had enough fun their first time to return.“If I had a magic wand, I’d get rid of the loud music and go acoustic,” White said. “You’ve got to have cool music and neat lighting. I’m not sure why it’s this idea that it needs to be really loud music and bad Jello shots.” At the Aug. 2 festival, Main Street resembled a miniature Bike Week without the motorcycles. Bearded men stood on the sidewalk drinking beer and smoking as they watched a small group of women dance to singer Tone Loc’s 1980s hit “Funky Cold Medina.” Nearby a woman walked around offering Jello shots on a tray, and in the middle of the street was a portable bar offering beer, wine and liquor. Across the street, a live band was belting out its rendition of “Soul Man.”A few food vendors were set up on the street, selling barbecue, hot pretzels, deep-fried Oreos and snow cones. A police officer on foot watched over the action.The crowd of roughly 125 people ranged from about age 5 to 65. One of the vendors, Debbie Gary of Daytona Beach, said she’s done well on nights it hasn’t rained.“After the fireworks at the Bandshell, we get lots of people,” said Gary, who sells hot dogs, sausages and hot pretzels. “It’s picked up since the beginning of July.”She said her profits have risen since her objections to the $250 nightly fee for vendors resulted in a drop to $75 per night.Gary doesn’t care for the dominance of alcohol and scantily clad women at the event.“This nonsense is not family friendly as far as I’m concerned,” she said.Amanda Jackson of Orlando stood with her 3-year-old son as she watched the dancers. She had eaten dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack earlier in the night and stumbled onto the street party.“It looks like more of a nightlife-type thing,” she said.Main Street businessman owner Pete Scianablo, who has run Tombstone Silverworks for 25 years, said he didn’t see any point in opening his shop during the Saturday night events. He didn’t think it would be the type of crowd that would buy his jewelry.“It’s always a good thing to get people on the street, but the bars were the only entertainment,” he said. “I didn’t see the real value of it.”Another vendor, Tim Clark, traveled all the way from Clermont to sell snow cones, $3 for a small one and $5 for a large. He had only been to the event twice, and was trying to figure out if it was worth the investment in gas money and the vendor fee.“I’m willing to keep trying,” he said. At the Aug. 2 event, the road was blocked off at S.R. A1A and Wild Olive Avenue. That was a change from previous Saturday nights there this summer, when the road was barricaded farther west toward the river. Some bar owners decided after the weekly festivals started June 14 they no longer wanted to be a part of them.Tom Guest, an organizer of the street parties and the former president of the Main Street Merchants Association, said the shrunken area for the event made it difficult to find a place for the bounce houses and other kids’ activities. The number of vendors also retracted over the summer, with some unable to come every week, said Guest, who ran a Main Street business for 26 years before he retired three years ago.Part of the reason the event struggled is because the idea wasn’t presented to the Main Street Merchants Association until a month or two before it began, and there was little time to set up vendors and advertise, Guest said. Rain on a lot of Saturday nights also turned off both customers and vendors.Guest defends the event as a good activity in a town that in his opinion doesn’t have much going on most Saturday nights.“I want to see Main Street survive and prosper, and do what I can to help,” said Guest, who hopes to see Main Street gain back a large mix of businesses. “If we do it next year, it’ll be bigger and better.”If the event continues again next summer, Webster hopes it has more of White’s toned down ideas and less of a Bike Week feel.“Main Street could be so much more,” Webster said.